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It may be interesting to have a current snapshot of the where we are at with the site. As you know 2018 has been a painful year not for just myself but for all users with the site software turmoil...well it seems there have been some developments on that front.

We were using Xenforo v1 and as I advised we had to make a move away from it...well this week Xenforo announced that ALL support and any kind of development will cease for that in May i.e. its End of life...so you can now see why I had to make a move away from it, as painful as it was.

We moved to Xenforo v2 for a short time, in retrospect perhaps a little too early, but I needed a lot of time to get it up to what my vision of the site is. I quickly found that it was loaded with issues and that many developers of 3rd party addons which this site heavily depended on, dropped any development. This left me with just a basic forum site with a Gallery and Resource sections.

The only other alternative was a product called IPS which had all the extras that I wanted to provide you all built in however it is a very complicated, not that user friendly (compared to Xenforo) solution that is also extremely resource hungry. In a time of panic and limited time on my hands as I began a new job I went for IPS but quickly found the reasons I didn't like it were also expressed by users. I was living out of a hotel room with a laptop and became very frustrated with not being able to fix your issues so I went back to Xenforo v2...at least we had a forum solution but it was extremely buggy but buggy that I could live with as users were not adversely impacted to the extreme but buggy still the same.

I then thought that if I could get IPS to look and feel a lot like Xenforo and remove much of the complication albeit extra functionality, it may be a solution that will help me realise my vision. I found Ahmed, an IPS 3rd party developer based in Egypt that could possibly help me to get IPS to a solution that will meet not only my vision but also help to make it easier for you, the user. I then moved back to IPS and Ahmed has been helping me to achieve what we have today.

Whilst all this has been going on Xenforo has released hundreds and hundreds of bug fixes to their version 2 and are about to release their version 2.1 which over the last couple of weeks I have had the pleasure in playing with the BETA versions and I can say that it is one hell of a nice, easy to use, powerful forum solution and whilst it may be the absolute best forum solution out there today it is still just a forum, gallery and resources solution. Also 3rd party developers of addons are starting to come back to xenforo with solutions for Blogs, Articles, Clubs (very basic) and a solution that could be used as an Aircraft section. Xenforo v2.1 is extremely fast, uses a hell of a lot less resources than IPS and is extremely smooth and user intuitive.

IPS has also advised that they will soon be releasing a new faster version of their solution. I have not had a chance to play with it as yet so I can't say anthing about it. We are currently experiencing issues with the resource hungry IPS, by many reports from other site owners I knew we would begin to experience this. I am looking into increasing our server specs, in fact a whole new server, with the latest multi-core processor, 32gb ram, fast Samsung SSD on a 1gb connection. This will see the hosting costs increase by around 50% and that is even with having to use a US based server, Australian location for this would be cost prohibitive, but it should make IPS perform much better.

There is still a lot more work to do with IPS and I am hoping that will take a maximum of 6 to 8 months before it is stabilised and ready for the final part of my vision.

Hope this keeps you all informed of what 2018 has been like for the site

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Yay, my Christmas present has arrived...My PC has been buckling under the pressure of IPS when trying to do any development etc. wish it was more like Xenforo, but my old PC which is a 6th Generation i5, 16gb ram, old style and twin SATA hard disks in RAID 0 just can't handle working with a 5gb site and over 1gb in database so I had to purchase a new PC. I am often setting something up late at night and having to let my PC run all night to do something but no more. So my new PC has arrived BUT IN MELBOURNE and I am in Sydney till end of the week

My new PC is Dell power machine which has an 8th Generation i7, 16gb of DDR4 ram, twin SSD 256gb disks in RAID 0, a secondary 2 terrabyte SATA hard disk for storage, fast ethernet card and a G-Force GTX 1070 with 8gb memory video card...watch me wind that up with IPS